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e1e36db
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It was nearly incomprehensible to him that the same people--that is, the media--who had violently criticized him for saying he might dispute the election result were now calling him illegitimate.
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Michael Wolff |
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4ee24b3
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Not only did the president-elect wear his deep and bitter grievances on his sleeve, but it was now clear that the fact of having been elected president would not change his unfiltered, apparently uncontrollable, utterly shoot-from-the-hip display of wounds, resentments, and ire.
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Michael Wolff |
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4aad71b
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Frank Sinatra was wrong," said David Bossie, one of Trump's longtime political advisers. "If you can make it in New York, you can't necessarily make it in Washington."
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Michael Wolff |
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ac04355
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He would never be able to untangle his holdings and interests--including big investments in the Middle East--in a way that would satisfy ethics watchdogs.
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Michael Wolff |
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9bf60ee
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In politics somebody has to lose, but invariably everybody thinks they can win. And you probably can't win unless you believe that you will win - except for the Trump campaign.
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Michael Wolff |
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bbb2455
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Among Trump's first moves as president was to have a series of inspirational photographs in the West Wing replaced with images of big crowd scenes at his inaugural ceremony.
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Michael Wolff |
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f0d7082
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Trump craved media approval. But, as Bannon emphasized, he was never going to get the facts right, nor was he ever going to acknowledge that he got them wrong, so therefore he was not going to get that approval.
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Michael Wolff |
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1878cff
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Just doing things became a Bannon principle, the sweeping antidote to bureaucratic and establishment ennui and resistance. It was the chaos of just doing things that actually got things done. Except, even if you assumed that not knowing how to do things didn't much matter if you just did them, it was still not clear who was going to do what you wanted to do. Or, a corollary, because nobody in the Trump administration really knew how to do a..
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Michael Wolff |
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78ab81a
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Trump, perhaps not yet appreciating the difference between becoming president and elevating his social standing,
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Michael Wolff |
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4660c9f
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This intelligence, it was rumored, consisted of spreadsheets kept by Susan Rice that listed the Trump team's Russian contacts; borrowing a technique from WikiLeaks, the documents were secreted on a dozen servers in different places. Before this broad distribution, when the information was
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Michael Wolff |
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eb66961
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Even before there was reason to suspect Sally Yates, they suspected her. The transition report said Trump wouldn't like the fifty-six-year-old Atlanta-born University of Georgia career Justice Department lawyer slated to step up to acting attorney general. There was something about a particular kind of Obama person. Something about the way they walked and held themselves. Superiority. And about a certain kind of woman who would immediately ..
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Michael Wolff |
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4088ac6
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Finally, there was a new rationale that Flynn should be fired not because of his Russian contacts, but because he had lied about them to the vice president. This was a convenient invention of a chain of command: in fact, Flynn did not report to Vice President Pence, and he was arguably a good deal more powerful than Pence.
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Michael Wolff |
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b5992ba
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Bypassing lawyers, regulators, and the agencies and personnel responsible for enforcing it, President Trump--with Bannon's low, intense voice behind him, offering a rush of complex information--signed what was put in front of him.
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Michael Wolff |
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fff589c
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Pivoting from Trump himself, Bannon plunged on with the Trump agenda. "Day one we're moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. Netanyahu's all in. Sheldon"--Sheldon Adelson, the casino billionaire, far-right Israel defender, and Trump supporter--"is all in. We know where we're heading on this." "Does Donald know?" asked a skeptical Ailes. Bannon smiled--as though almost with a wink--and continued: "Let Jordan take the West Bank, let Egypt take ..
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Michael Wolff |
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901ac63
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Indeed, in his first weeks in the White House, an inattentive Trump was already trying to curtail his schedule of meetings, limit his hours in the office, and keep his normal golf habits.
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Michael Wolff |
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f316117
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Many of the accounts of what has happened in the Trump White House are in conflict with one another; many, in Trumpian fashion, are baldly untrue.
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Michael Wolff |
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e272f4b
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Day one we're moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. Netanyahu's all in.
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Michael Wolff |
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dd6f318
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Trump craved media approval. But, as Bannon emphasized, he was never going to get the facts right, nor was he ever going to acknowledge that he got them wrong, so therefore he was not going to get that approval. This meant, next best thing, that he had to be aggressively defended against the media's disapproval.
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Michael Wolff |
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d0e93f9
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Almost all the professionals who were now set to join him were coming face to face with the fact that it appeared he knew nothing.
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Michael Wolff |
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acc4f3a
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He was the winner and now expected to be the object of awe, fascination, and favor. He expected this to be binary: a hostile media would turn into a fannish one.
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Michael Wolff |
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64289ac
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Even though Trump liked to portray his business as an empire, it was actually a discrete holding company and boutique enterprise,
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Michael Wolff |
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ad59795
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the president-elect spoke with little information and frequently no factual basis, while "the frame the media has chosen to embrace is that everything the man does is, by default, unconstitutional or an abuse of power."
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Michael Wolff |
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a5a403b
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Media is personal. It is a series of blood scores. The media in its often collective mind decides who is going to rise and who is going to fall, who lives and who dies. If you stay around long enough in the media eye, your fate, like that of a banana republic despot, is often an unkind one--a law Hillary Clinton was not able to circumvent. The media has the last word.
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Michael Wolff |
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aee5605
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And then there was the harsh fact that the world of Manhattan and particular its living voice, the media, seemed to cruelly reject them. The media long ago turned on Donald Trump as a wannabe and lightweight, and wrote him off for that ultimate sin--anyway, the ultimate sin in media terms--of trying to curry favor with the media too much. His fame, such as it was, was actually reverse fame--he was famous for being infamous. It was joke fame..
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Michael Wolff |
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bbd500d
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To everyone working in media in New York, Donald Trump represented the ultimate shame of working in media in New York: you might have to write about Donald Trump. Not writing about him, or certainly not taking him at face value, became a moral stand.
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Michael Wolff |
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08d0042
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He reprimanded the housekeeping staff for picking up his shirt from the floor: "If my shirt is on the floor, it's because I want it on the floor." Then he imposed a set of new rules: nobody touch anything, especially not his toothbrush. (He had a longtime fear of being poisoned, one reason why he liked to eat at McDonald's--nobody knew he was coming and the food was safely premade.)"
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Michael Wolff |
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bf8e034
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Walsh, sitting within sight of the Oval Office, was located at something like the ground zero of the information flow between the president and his staff. As Trump's primary scheduler, her job was to ration the president's time and organize the flow of information to him around the priorities that the White House had set. In this, Walsh became the effective middle person among the three men working hardest to maneuver the president--Bannon,..
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Michael Wolff |
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e030c53
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Jared Kushner in quite a short period of time--rather less than a year--had crossed over from the standard Democratic view in which he was raised, to an acolyte of Trumpism, bewildering many friends and, as well, his own brother, whose insurance company, Oscar, funded with Kushner-family money, was destined to be shattered by a repeal of Obamacare.
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Michael Wolff |
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2df9af6
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Lewandowski and Hope Hicks, the PR aide put on the campaign by Ivanka Trump, had an affair that ended in a public fight on the street--
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Michael Wolff |
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b58d6d5
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In 2014, when he first seriously began to consider running for president, Melania was one of the few who thought it was possible he could win. It was a punch line for his daughter, Ivanka, who had carefully distanced herself from the campaign. With a never-too-hidden distaste for her stepmother, Ivanka would say to friends: All you have to know about Melania is that she thinks if he runs he'll certainly win.
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Michael Wolff |
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d92cac7
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transmogrification
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Michael Wolff |
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288b23d
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In business meetings, observers would be nonplussed that Charlie and Jared Kushner invariably greeted each other with a kiss and that the adult Jared called his father Daddy.
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Michael Wolff |
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75f777c
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David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest.
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Michael Wolff |
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2bfa745
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The Tea Party movement, with Trump as its remarkable face and voice, had come to power--something like total power. It owned the Republican Party. Publicly breaking Paul Ryan was the obvious and necessary step.
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Michael Wolff |
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bf81d95
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Trump liked to say that one of the things that made life worth living was getting your friends' wives into bed. In pursuing a friend's wife, he would try to persuade the wife that her husband was perhaps not what she thought. Then he'd have his secretary ask the friend into his office; once the friend arrived, Trump would engage in what was, for him, more or less constant sexual banter. Do you still like having sex with your wife? How often..
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Michael Wolff |
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67dac31
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based on conversations that took place over a period of eighteen months with the president,
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Michael Wolff |
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7522dac
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The first couple of times when I went to the White House, someone had to say, This is Mick Mulvaney, he's the budget director," said Mulvaney. And in Mulvaney's telling Trump was too scattershot to ever be of much help, tending to interrupt planning with random questions that seem to have come from someone's recent lobbying or by some burst of free association."
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Michael Wolff |
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0d663c3
|
But another likely leak source about his angst in the White House was Trump himself. In his calls throughout the day and at night from his bed, he frequently spoke to people who had no reason to keep his confidences.
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Michael Wolff |
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9eea737
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As for the looming defeat itself, she shrugged it off: it was Reince Priebus's fault, not hers.
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Michael Wolff |
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61c2f7c
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Not only did Trump disregard the potential conflicts of his business deals and real estate holdings, he audaciously refused to release his tax returns. Why should he if he wasn't going to win? What's more, Trump refused to spend any time considering, however hypothetically, transition matters, saying it was "bad luck"--but really meaning it was a waste of time. Nor would he even remotely contemplate the issue of his holdings and conflicts. ..
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Michael Wolff |
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204041d
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he had never been able to tailor his behavior to what the goals at hand reasonably required.
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Michael Wolff |
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225f080
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He knew where this Russia stuff was coming from, and if these Obama people thought they were going to get away with it they had another think coming. He would expose them all!
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Michael Wolff |
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0aca889
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The Best and the Brightest. (One of the
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Michael Wolff |
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8763ea6
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Trump was impetuous and yet did not like to make decisions, at least not ones that seemed to corner him into having to analyze a problem.
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Michael Wolff |